Why The Rest Of Ukraine Will Resist Moscow's Gravitational Pull

Sergei Nakonechniy was sitting in a cafe in the eastern Ukrainian
city of Donetsk when a
middle-aged woman rose from a nearby table and stormed toward
him. She pointed to his camouflage jacket, which
bore the insignia of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – a
controversial World War II anti-Soviet movement.

“Your fascist badges and uniforms are provoking the whole
conflict in this country,” she shouted at the pro-Ukraine activist
and journalism student.

“All of our problems are because of you and your fascist friends
from western Ukraine. You should be ashamed!”

With Crimea effectively part of Russia, if
perhaps not legally, Mr. Nakonechniy and other residents of
Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern regions are now the new focus in
the battle for the future of this country of about 46 million.
But Donetsk and the industrialized region around it, known as the
Donbass, are less likely to follow Crimea’s example due to an
array of constraining factors – not least among them a
generational divide between youths like Nakonechniy and their
parents who still harbor an affinity for Russia.

A former Soviet industry hub

Unlike Crimea, the Donbass has a stable economic base from its
industrial output and coal resources – an inheritance from its
Soviet past.

Older generations in the Donbass nostalgically remember
the Soviet
Union, when the coal miners, steel workers, and laborers in
the region’s heavy industries were heralded as heroes building a
utopian, communist future. They were rewarded with vacations on
the Black Sea resorts and received special food packages with
high-quality delicacies not available in state-owned grocery
stores.

For many in Donetsk, the anti government protests
in Kiev and across western Ukraine seemed to be
a dismissal of the respect they deserved in building the Soviet
state. So when Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his March
18 speech, which announced his decision to annex Crimea, that
USSR dissolution was one of the century’s biggest tragedies,
people in Donetsk felt he was acknowledging them.

Nakonechniy’s father shares those sentiments. A construction
worker, he lives and works inMoscow, and stopped
speaking to his son three months ago – after the shock of
learning that he had participated in the antigovernment protests
on Kiev’s Maidan square.

In Donetsk, Euromaidan activists have tried to stage rallies to
support Ukrainian unity. At their height, the numbers have
reached into the hundreds – a scenario that would have been
impossible in pre-referendum Crimea, where opponents to joining
Russia had all but been forced underground.

People of all ages attended the rallies in Donetsk, according to
Katya Zhemchuzhnykova, a young local pro-EU activist. But there
is a large portion of the pro-Europe supporters
who are young, like Nakonechniy, and “identify themselves as
Ukrainian and as being born in independent Ukraine,” Ms.
Zhemchuzhnykova said.

“They might speak Russian, but they see themselves as
Ukrainians,” she said.

Moscow’s gravitational pull

Many people here feel similarly bound to Moscow, if not by
citizenship then by a deep historic bond. Pro-Russia
demonstrators greatly outnumbered a pro-Ukraine group on March
13, when a violent clash in the city center left one person dead
and scores injured. Today, people with Russian flags guard the
statue of Lenin in the city’s central square.

“For us, watching the destruction of Lenin statues around Ukraine
was heartbreaking,” said Lyudmila Kanchanovskaya, a local
teacher. “We have a lot to be grateful for what he did for us. He
gave hundreds of millions of Russians an education…. We may not
be the Soviet Union anymore, but we shouldn’t forget his role in
our history and just remove him.”

But at the same time, support for a full-out split with Kiev is
much more measured here, even among the pro-Russian activists.

“As I see it, there are now two options for Ukraine: become a
federation or completely disappear as a country,” says Sergei
Buntovskiy, an activist from Russian Bloc, a pro-Moscow political
party. “But dividing the country? No one wants this, the older
generations or the younger ones. If a referendum were held today,
I think only 30 percent of the population would agree to it.”

Russian troops would also not be as widely supported here as they
were in Crimea, Mr. Buntovskiy said. “I think more than half of
the population would be very scared by troops arriving in
Donbass.”

“Crimea has a stronger history of the nationalist question than
we do here,” said Ms. Zhemchuzhnykova, the pro-EU activist. “We
are more mixed here because so many different Soviet people came
here to work. That may save us from Russia trying to use
ethnicity as a tool in this game.”

The language flash point

If Kiev grants rights and guarantees to eastern Ukraine, many
residents say, a future under the Ukrainian flag is possible.

Those who are in favor of closer ties with Russia reject what
they say are nationalist tones from the new government in Kiev.
They want equal rights for Russian speakers, spelled out in laws
that would allow commercials, signs, and most importantly
educational institutions, to use Russian.

“Right now, students have to write dissertations in Ukrainian,”
said Buntovskiy, who is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the
Donetsk National University. “If I write a research paper in
Ukrainian, my potential audience is about 30 million. If I write
it in Russian, that number grows about 5 times.”

Women talk as they take a
walk with a child in a pram while armed men, believed to be
Russian servicemen, follow them outside a Ukrainian military base
in Perevalnoye, near the Crimean city of
Simferopol.REUTERS/Vasily
Fedosenko

Language issues are a driving force in the debate for Ukraine’s
future, and the new Kiev government has played a part in fueling
the tension. Shortly after being sworn into office, the
parliament passed a law that essentially barred equal status for
the Russian language in regions like Donetsk.

The interim Ukrainian president, Oleksandr Turchynov, vetoed the
law in an attempt to deescalate the situation.

The interim government in Kiev this week signaled that it was
examining legislation to allow for more regional autonomy, which
could allow individual districts to decide for themselves about
language and other local issues. For many younger eastern
Ukrainians like Buntovskiy, these sort of changes are the only
way to remain part of Ukraine. But Kiev must “cease trying to
make Ukraine a nationalist dictatorship,” he said.

Many in the older generations here, who remember what communist
life was like, feel ready to join Russia because they think they
will have a better, more stable life, Buntovskiy said. For them,
it’s not a matter of feeling more Russian or more Ukrainian.
Often, they simply say that they feel more Soviet, and that is
largely what has driven the divide between the generations.

“We are Soviet people here, and we shouldn’t be shamed for that,”
Kanchanovskaya said. “In the west, they have their heroes, who
fought against our grandfathers [in World War II]. “But they
aren’t heroes to us. We have our Soviet heroes, and we are proud
of them.”